Improving the capacity of a wireless communication system is perhaps one of the most important areas in cellular technology that requires further exploration. Deficiencies in the spectral efficiency and power consumption of mobile systems have motivated wireless communication system designers to explore new areas in the technology that will offer capacity relief. One of these new areas is the use of antenna arrays in wireless systems to improve system capacity.
Antenna arrays deal with using multiple antenna elements at a receiver and/or transmitter to improve the capacity of the system. For example, using multiple antennas in a wireless receiver offers diversity of received signals. This proves to work well in fading environments and multi-path environments, where one path of a signal received by one antenna of the receiver may be subjected to difficult obstacles. In this scenario, the other antennas of the receiver receive different paths of the signal, thus increasing the probability that a better component of the signal, (i.e., a less corrupt version of the signal), may be received.
One of the challenges facing the use of antenna arrays is that they usually require a high degree of computational complexity. This is because the system will attempt to process each signal at each antenna by a separate digital baseband processing element which may lead to excessive power consumption, hardware resources, and processing time.
OFDM is a technology that is being considered by different industry drivers for use in many different communications applications, including antenna arrays. It is desired to find ways to reduce the complexity of antenna array receiver systems using OFDM technology.